Lord Heseltine flunks history

LONDON — The former Conservative defense secretary Michael Heseltine has said that U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron will be “a laughing stock across the world” if he allows cabinet ministers to campaign to leave the EU in the coming EU referendum, saying “If they feel so strongly then they should resign, although it is quite difficult for me to understand how they’re in the cabinet in the first place.”

In fact, the only person liable to become a laughing stock is Lord Heseltine himself, for his fundamental ignorance of the British constitution, made all the more risible because he himself resigned from Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet in 1986 (over the Westland helicopter controversy) and therefore presumably should know the difference between presidential and prime ministerial politics.

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Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and can be sacked by the prime minister, but they owe their duty of conscience to the Crown and nation, not to the prime minister. In an issue regarding the destiny of the United Kingdom such as the EU referendum is, it would be inconceivable that cabinet ministers would not be allowed to follow their consciences rather than have their careers and livelihoods threatened.

If this was a ‘first,’ Heseltine’s intervention might have some value. But it isn’t.

The fact that the number of Conservative MPs who are believed to tend towards the Vote Leave position constitutes about half of the entire parliamentary party proves that their representatives in cabinet are not some small undistinguished rump, but instead constitute a significant branch of Tory thinking regarding Britain’s future. They will thus not be so easily bullied as Lord Heseltine thinks.

If this were a constitutionally unprecedented situation then perhaps Heseltine’s intervention might have some value, but it isn’t. We have been here before, and the governing party was not only able to conduct a perfectly rational and good-natured debate, but was also capable of coming together afterward and govern the country for several years until the next general election, which they lost for reasons entirely unconnected to the European issue.

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The clear historical precedent for the present situation is that of the 1975 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the Common Market. Prime Minister Harold Wilson called that referendum but cabinet ministers who supported withdrawal — about one-third of the Cabinet, as today — were not required to resign their posts because there was no collective cabinet responsibility set on the question of whether Britain should be in or out of the Common Market, any more than there is today regarding the EU. (Indeed Cameron is on record as stating that he could envisage circumstances in which he himself would recommend a vote to leave the EU were he to return from Brussels without a deal.)

Heseltine could, therefore, not be more wrong when he says: “There is a collective loyalty and the consequence of having a free vote, if you like, would be that the divisions, the divisiveness, the bitterness that would flow would actually, in my view, make the prime minister’s position very difficult.” He went on to blame the Labour Government’s defeat in the May 1979 general election on divisions that had occurred four years earlier during the EEC vote, claiming that “the consequence was that we had the winter of discontent that helped to keep Labour out of power. It kept the Labour party out of power for nearly two decades.’

Old men forget, but old politicians forget selectively, and if Lord Heseltine really thinks that the Winter of Discontent happened because of Labour splits over the EEC rather than the ambitions of overweening trade union barons, he needs to consult “Not for Turning,” the first volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Thatcher. As an MP from 1966 onward, Heseltine probably knows the truth as well as anyone, but chooses to twist history to suit his long-standing Europhiliac beliefs. The European issue was not a significant factor in the 1979 general election, which like its predecessor in 1974 was all about who governed Britain: the government or the unions?

The Tory party will reunite in 2017-18 and move past Heseltine’s bogus retelling of the past.

In Michael Heseltine’s style of politics — in which he flounced out of the cabinet and tried to bring down a truly great prime minister over the fortunes of a small West Country helicopter company — it is perfectly true that “the divisions, the divisiveness, the bitterness” play a central part. The rest of the Tory party is more mature than that, however. After agreeing to disagree during the prescribed period of the EU referendum, the cabinet will reunite afterward, regardless of the outcome, and go on to fight the next general election against Jeremy’s Corbyn’s Labour Party, which will also have been split over Europe — as well as so much more.

One thing is certain: The reunited Tory party of 2017-18 will not need to resort to the kind of bogus constitutional theorizing and ahistorical retelling of the past in which Michael Heseltine is presently indulging.

Andrew Roberts is a British historian.

This story was corrected to reflect that Lord Heseltine resigned from his Cabinet position in 1986, not 1985.